One of the constellations of the southern sky introduced by Nicolas Louis de
Lacaille on his map of 1756 to symbolize experimental physics. He originally
called it la Machine Pneumatique but Latinized this to Antlia Pneumatica on the
second edition of the map published in 1763. Lacaille depicted it as the
single-cylinder type of pump used by the French physicist Denis Papin during
the early 1670s for his experiments on vacuums, published as Expériences du Vuide in 1674. In 1675 Papin moved from Paris to London where he worked with the
Irish physicist Robert Boyle. Here Papin developed the more efficient
double-cylinder type of pump, and it is one of these later types of pump that
was depicted by Bode his Uranographia (below). An air pump of this type is depicted in action in the painting titled “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” by Joseph Wright of Derby (1768).
There are no legends associated with this constellation and it contains no
bright stars or other objects of note. Its name, however, is one to catch the
unwary as it is frequently mis-spelt “Antila”.
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The air pump shown as a complex piece of apparatus in the Uranographia of Johann Bode. Compare this with Lacaille’s simple depiction. Air pumps became scientific toys for the rich during the 18th century,
© Ian Ridpath. All rights reserved
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